Introduction

Two-part personal names,
such as those consisting of a first or given name and a family name, are common
throughout the modern world in general and in the Spanish- and English-speaking
worlds in particular. The use of two-part personal names is not universal,
however. Also, there are major differences as to how they are implemented. We
will see, for instance, that there are some major differences in how naming
conventions work in the English-speaking and the Spanish-speaking worlds.

First of all, all people have a givenname, also known as
a firstname or personal name.
Another term for this name in the Christian tradition in English was Christianname, since such names typically had to come from a set of names approved
by the Church and derived from the Bible or from saints’ names and it was given
to the child at the time of baptism.

In Spanish, the first name is still known primarily as nombredepila, or ‘baptismal name’.
This name is derived from the word pila,
which refers to the stone container for holy water used in baptism. This noun comes
from Lat. pīla, meaning
‘mortar, vessel in which things are pounded’ and, related to that meaning,
‘washbasin, sink’. The word pila is still used in some dialects of Spanish with
the meaning ‘sink, basin’, though it sounds archaic in most dialects. The word pila is used in modern Spanish to refer to
small-size batteries (containers of electricity), such as those for watches or flashlights,
as opposed to large batteries such as those in a car, which are called baterías. (In some dialects of Spanish,
however, both are called baterías.)

There was another word pīla
in Latin, which may have been cognate with the former, but which had a very
different meaning, namely ‘pillar’ or ‘pier’. Perhaps to avoid the confusion,
this second word pīla
was changed to *pilāre, meaning ‘pillar’,
in Medieval Latin or Vulgar Latin, which is the source of Eng. pillar and Sp. pilar. The second pīla
did not disappear, however, and it ended up as Sp. pila and its cognate Eng. pile,
both meaning ‘pile, heap’. English borrowed the word pile from French in the early 15th century. Spanish may
have borrowed this word from Catalan (cf. Corominas).

Middle names in English

It was not uncommon for people to have more than one given
name in the past, in order to honor different ancestors. In the modern English-speaking
world, this custom has settled into most people having one optional second given
name, called middle name, in addition to their main (first) name. In the Hispanic
world, the tradition of giving multiple names to a child at the time of baptism
and in birth certificates is not dead, but for official purposes, people only
have one single given name. Some such given names may be compounded names,
however, as we shall see.

In the English-speaking world, the additional, secondary given
name has been known since the 19th century as a middlename.[i]
As we said, the middle name is a remnant of the multiple (secondary and
optional) given names of earlier times. Middle names are not required and people
usually have at most one single middle name. Only royalty and other aristocracy
nowadays have more than two such names.[ii]

In North America, the middle name is often reduced to an initial
and not used at all for most purposes. In the United States, a middle name is not
required and some people only have a middle initial, which does not stand for any
name, as in the name of the 33rd president of the United States, Harry
S. Truman.[iii]
This middle initial is only used nowadays (optionally) in official documents and
formal situations. Some people turn a mother’s last name into a child’s middle name,
as in John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK).[iv]
Others turn a maiden family name into a middle name upon adopting a husband’s last
name.

Compound first names in Spanish

In the Spanish-speaking
world, there are no middle names in official names in the same sense as in the
English-speaking world. Some people may have multiple given (first) names given
to them at birth, but for purposes of identification, only one is used. Spanish
names, however, sometimes look like they contain a middle name at first sight. That
is because Spanish often uses compound first names, such as JoséLuis,
Juan Carlos, or MaríaElena. These names may
look like a combination of first and middle names to an English speaker, but that
is not what they are.

Compound first
names are different from given names that consist of a first name and a middle
name in that the two parts cannot be split and are thus pronounced as single words
and, as such, they contain a single stressed syllable. Take the woman’s name MaríaElena, for example. It is not pronounced [ma.ˈɾi.a.e.ˈle.na], two
words with seven syllables, two of which are stressed, but rather [ma.ɾi̯ae̯.ˈle.na],
one word with four syllables and a single stressed syllable.[1]

In earlier
times, following Catholic tradition, such compound names were typically formed with
the name María, in deference to the Virgin
Mary, along with another name. In the case of men’s names, the name Maria is added after the other name, e.g.
JoseMaría, as in the name of the former president of Spain, JoséMaríaAznar.[2]

In the case of female names, María is typically the first part of a compound name that includes some
quality of the Virgin Mary, e.g. MaríadelaCaridad ‘Mary of Charity’
or a place in which the Virgin Mary supposedly made an appeared. In these cases,
women are typically known by the second part of the name, in this case Caridad ‘Charity’, though their official
name may include the María part. Needless
to say, such names are not the norm any longer in most Spanish-speaking
countries, but they were in earlier times and they are still found. We will
look at some of these names in detail in section §44.2.1
below.

[1] This single
phonetic word has an i that is a semivowel
([i̯]), not a full vowel ([i]), since it is not stressed and thus forms a diphthong
with the adjacent vowel. It also has a (normally) reduced e given that it is part of the same word (see Part I, Chapter 7).

[2] In Spain,
a hypocoristic or pet name for men having such compound names may include the María part shorted to Mari, as in JoseMari. Another hypocoristic
for JoseMaría in Spain is Chema, a
child-speak hypocorism.